Custom Variables

Last Modified May 4, 2018|
Originally Posted August 15, 2014

Custom variables are useful when affiliates want to forward more values than there are affiliate sub ID fields or when they don’t want to store values in affiliate sub IDs. One example of this is when an advertiser wants to pre-populate a form with user information. The affiliate gathers information from a user before they click through the tracking link, then passes the information seamlessly through to the advertiser’s offer URL.

Note: Custom variables are not stored, but can still be viewed in the click logs via the Tracking Link URL field.

Step 1: Enable Custom Variables in Offer

To enable custom variables for an offer, go to the offer’s page and find the Tracking panel. Click Edit. Set Custom Variables to “Enabled” and click Save once you’re finished.

Step 2: Add Custom Variables to Default Offer URL

Now that the feature has been enabled, we need to set up the default offer URL (or any additional offer URLs) to pass the custom variables though on click. This step will also tell the generate tracking tool what custom variables to look for so you can add them in Step 3.

Click Edit in the Details section of the offer. In the default offer URL we are going to add three custom variables to our landing page: purchase type, item condition, and delivery method. Start with our standard URL like this:

These parameters are going to depend on what the advertiser has set up, so talk to your advertiser or tech team to see what parameters you can pass these values into. The feature looks at the values set in the curly brackets ({}) and is going to determine those are the values to pass to. In this example, the parameters and macros (in the curly brackets) are the same, but that is not required.

Once these variables have been set in the offer URL, you can click Save.

Step 3: Add Variables to Tracking Link

The last step is to generate a tracking link with the values that pass through the custom variables to the offer landing page. Back on the offer’s page, find the Generate Tracking panel.

Generate a tracking link, then check the Add Custom Variables box to display a list of each custom variable you added earlier:

The name fields are populated with the variables you set in curly brackets back in step 2, and the tracking link generated appends the new variables to the end:

You can give this tracking link directly to your affiliate for them to use. They need only fill in custom variable values with their own. To run a test, you can enter dummy information in the Value column of the Custom Variables form.

As an example, we can test a purchase type of “bulk”, item condition of “used”, and delivery method of “standard”. Doing so updates the generated tracking link, which then looks something like this: